Nitehawk Cinema and Lo-Res

136 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn (718-782-8370)

Certain activities can be improved by the addition of alcohol—blind dates, golf. Others are inevitably made worse—e-mailing your boss, trimming your bangs. Then there are those, such as cinema-going, that can swing either way. On a recent evening at Nitehawk, in Williamsburg, one patron’s wait for her date to see “The Parallax View” (a 1974 Alan J. Pakula political thriller, with Warren Beatty as a huge-haired muckraker) was improved by a chilled Tecate. When the lights dimmed, she handed a scrap of paper to a waitress (job requirements: crouching, night vision, experience as a ball girl a plus) that read, “Tequila tonic, please.” Her neighbors ordered queso, a kale salad, and fried pickles—a smorgasbord generating smells and sounds that made one long for the days of Junior Mints. Onscreen, an actress playing a waitress said, “They say that a Martini is like a woman’s breast: one ain’t enough and three is too many.” Bang! Bang! Fin. People filed down to the Lo-Res bar, where cocktails allude to cult movies (Buckaroo Banzai, Five Deadly Venoms) and oddball VHS tapes play on crappy TVs. Across the street, a family could be observed, through a window, having their own screening. A cartoon savant noted, “That’s ‘Mickey’s Christmas Carol.’ But Christmas, in August?” No better way to process a paradox than to have another drink. ♦